Measuring Teacher and Leader Performance: Cross-Sector Lessons for Excellent Evaluations

For too long, performance measurement systems in education have failed to document and recognize real differences among educators.

A recent national push to use performance evaluations for critical education personnel decisions has highlighted the shortcomings of our current systems and increased the urgency to improve them dramatically. This report, written with support from The Joyce Foundation, summarizes best practices and research from other sectors into six steps for education leaders who want accurate, reliable, and meaningful information about educators’ performance.

These steps are:

1. Determine the purposes of performance measurement;

2. Choose job objectives that align with the organization’s mission;

3. Design performance measures to clarify and stimulate staff actions that contribute to success;

4. Set performance standards so that leaders and staff know what good performance looks like;

5. Design the performance measurement process thoughtfully; and

6. Use measurement results to take action.

For more on each of these steps for effective performance measurement, read the report here.